PHILADELPHIA YOUNG PLAYWRIGHTS
  • Programs
    • In School Programs
    • 2025 Annual Playwriting Festival
    • Community-Based Programs
  • About
    • Mission & History
    • People
    • Alumni
    • Supporters
    • Podcast
    • Press
    • Careers
    • Donate
  • Classes
    • Current Offerings
  • On Stage
    • SaturPLAY 2025
    • Play Development Series at Rutgers Camden
    • Play Development Series at Drexel
    • Play Development Series at CCP 2024
    • New Voices 2024
  • Resources
    • PYP at Home
    • Quarantine Challenge
    • For Students
    • For Educators
    • For Parents

 Opportunities

We are currently accepting applicants for the following open positions:
  • Teaching Artists
  • Actors
  • Resident Dramaturg
<
>
Teaching Artists

The majority of Philadelphia Young Playwrights’ Core Programs take place on-site at schools during the school day and after-school with students K-12 in the Greater Philadelphia Area; however, some special programs and classes take place at arts and community facilities throughout Philadelphia throughout the calendar year. 

To execute these programs to the highest quality, we ask our teaching artists to:  be an active theatre professional in the Philadelphia area, be available to teach a long residency format (2-8 months) and to have experience teaching on-site at schools.  Prior experience partnering with classroom teachers is a plus. We welcome theatre artists of all disciplines to our roster, but ask that all teaching artists have a solid understanding of the playwriting process and/or significant experience in new play development.

Currently Young Playwrights maintains a roster of 25 – 30 teaching artists.

Interested in teaching for us? 
Submit a resume, references, sample lesson plan, and cover letter to [email protected].  Materials may be submitted at any time. 
Actors

Philadelphia Young Playwrights has a community of actors who primarily work in our core program, providing feedback and performing cold reads of our students’ original work during classroom visits led by PYP teaching artists. Actor visits are scheduled on an ongoing basis, typically with 1 to 3 weeks notice. Most take place during the school day. All PYP actors are required to fill out clearance paperwork (covered by PYP), and our actor rate is $35/hr. Actors in our community are also given priority casting in productions with PYP and our producing partners. 

As an organization which serves the Greater Philadelphia area, we place high priority on building and maintaining a community of actors which proportionally aligns with the demographics of the students and communities we serve. 

We accept submissions from actors with the following qualifications:

- experience in new play development (have worked on at least one new play with the playwright involved in the rehearsal process)
- experience working with young people (have worked with students on a play, have worked as an instructor / assistant instructor)
- experience with Philadelphia Young Playwrights programs, including participating in the program as a student or as a classroom teacher
- strong ability as a cold reader
- hold a degree in theatre and/or have substantial professional experience
- passion for our mission of using theatre as a tool to tap the potential for youth and inspire learning through playwriting

​

Interested in acting for us?

Qualified applicants should submit a headshot and resume to [email protected]. Materials may be submitted at any time.
Resident Dramaturg

Pay: $12,350 per year. 6-12 hours per week of work.

Philadelphia Young Playwrights is seeking an experienced new play dramaturg and educator to serve as a Resident Dramaturg for our season of plays created by young playwrights from across the Philadelphia region. 

The Job: 
As a Resident Dramaturg for Philadelphia Young Playwrights, you will serve as a key partner for our young playwrights, aged 8-19, whose work has been chosen for production or development with professional and collegiate actors. You will help them realize the vision and goals for their work, work with them to identify and accomplish any revision goals, and help them learn their own styles and tendencies as a writer and revisor. Your job will be to help guide them to accomplish their own goals, not prescribe goals to them.

Before rehearsal starts, you will communicate with playwrights and hold at least 2 meetings with each playwright to help identify their goals and help them accomplish any revisions, and to ensure you know the vision and values behind their pieces. For some playwrights, this may look like giving them writing challenges to help them envision how they can go about revisions, whereas with others it may be sitting with them as they write. How this process works is up to you and the playwrights to discover together. 

During rehearsals, you will serve as the liaison between the playwright and director, ensuring the student's voice and vision is prioritized in the rehearsal room. You will be in close contact with students, whether or not they are present during rehearsal to ensure their goals and visions are being met by the work in the room. For some of the student pieces, you will do historical or cultural research to share with the playwrights and rehearsal rooms, but the focus of your work will be on new play dramaturgy with the playwrights, not production dramaturgy. 

You will also be in close communication with the Resident Producer and Director of Education and Programs about your conversations with playwrights, filling us in on their writing and revision progress and their availability for rehearsals and performances. 

The Schedule:
In this role, you will serve as dramaturg for student productions and readings throughout the year, including:

Dramaturgy for two student playwrights during the Temple New Voices Workshop Productions (September-October). October will be the busiest time of the year and we will ask that you attend 10-12 hours of rehearsal each week of this month. Rehearsals take place 6-10pm Monday-Friday, and during the day on Saturdays. 

Dramaturgy for 2-3 students playwrights for the October-November CCP reading. These rehearsals take place twice a week during the day in 2-3 hour windows. We will ask you to attend at least one reherals each week. Since this is the only during the day rehearsal schedule, this is negotiable. We understand you may be balancing this job with a day job. 

Dramaturgy for 4-5 student playwrights for Drexel reading in February. These rehearsals take place 6-9pm for one week of February. We ask that you attend 12 hours of rehearsal this week. 

Dramaturgy for 1-2 student playwrights for Rutgers reading in February-March. This will be a total of 12 hours of rehearsal, spread between two weeks.

Dramaturgy for 3-5 student playwrights for SaturPLAY workshop production in April. This will be a total of 24 hours of rehearsal, spread between two weeks, typically 4-8pm. 

Dramaturgy for one to two summer workshop production or reading, TBA

Outside of your time in rehearsals, you will also be asked to be a mentor with 3-5 playwrights, to meet virtually with them to help them develop their work. These are playwrights whose pieces and voices showed great promise, but who we did not have space in our season to produce, so they may be playwrights whose work will be produced in the coming seasons. These sessions will be self scheduled. 

In the summer, you will also serve as a section head for our Literary Committee process, reading and evaluating a group of up to 175 student plays, and helping to guide a group of readers in writing feedback for those student playwrights. This work will be self scheduled. 

You will also be asked to have biweekly check in meetings with the Director of Education, but these can be scheduled around your availability. 

The Qualifications:
We are seeking an experienced new play dramaturg who is excited about working with a huge variety of play styles and playwright experience levels. Ideally you have worked on play readings and workshops before and are ready to jump in to help our young playwrights feel like professionals!

We are also seeking someone who has significant experience working with young people of a wide variety of ages. Our program values treating our young playwrights as experts in their own stories and writing, but we also acknowledge that young people are all at different points and experiences in their development as writers, thinkers, and speakers, and dramaturging for an adult playwright and an 8 year old or 18 year old are all very different experiences. We will guide you in learning this role and getting to know our young playwrights and playwriting model, but having previous experience as an educator or at least with young people at various points of development would be helpful. 

Finally, we are seeking someone who is able to put their own ego and taste aside in service of the goals of our young playwrights. Even more than when mentoring and dramaturging for adults, dramaturging for young people we need you to find every way possible to uplift their own instincts instead of imposing your own. Our young playwrights can so easily adopt outside adult voices as their own and our goal is always to lift their own inner voice up instead of allowing them to conform to our own ideals of taste or success. 

To Apply:
Please submit your cover letter and resume to Madeline Charne at [email protected] by August 1st
Picture
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

Contact Us!
Job Opportunities
Press Room

Donate
Picture
© Philadelphia Young Playwrights - 1219 Vine Street, Floor 2 Philadelphia, PA 19107
Phone: 215-665-9226
Fax: 215-665-9228 Email: [email protected]
  • Programs
    • In School Programs
    • 2025 Annual Playwriting Festival
    • Community-Based Programs
  • About
    • Mission & History
    • People
    • Alumni
    • Supporters
    • Podcast
    • Press
    • Careers
    • Donate
  • Classes
    • Current Offerings
  • On Stage
    • SaturPLAY 2025
    • Play Development Series at Rutgers Camden
    • Play Development Series at Drexel
    • Play Development Series at CCP 2024
    • New Voices 2024
  • Resources
    • PYP at Home
    • Quarantine Challenge
    • For Students
    • For Educators
    • For Parents